FRIEDMAN WOULD MAKE HITLER AND HIMMLER PROUD ..... HE BELONGS IN THE TUNNELS WITH HIS HAMAS COMRADES

Thomas Friedman’s ugly 50th anniversary

He launched his public career as America’s most prominent defamer of Israel on Nov. 12, 1974. 

 

By Moshe Phillips

 

JNS

Oct 8, 2024 

 

Thomas Friedman (right) stands with Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat in Lebanon in 1984 

 

In his New York Times column on Oct. 7, of all dates, Thomas L. Friedman stated that the Palestinian Authority “has endorsed the Oslo peace process.” The Oslo Accords require the P.A. to disarm and outlaw terrorist groups, arrest terrorists, and extradite them to Israel. It has not done any of that, which is what compels Israel to occasionally send its forces into P.A.-governed territory in pursuit of terrorists. Friedman knows this and yet ignores the fact.

Next month will mark the 50th anniversary of Friedman’s launching his public career as America’s most prominent defamer of Israel. Perhaps it’s fitting that in his Sept. 25 column, he sank to what may be his moral low point when he characterized Israel’s anti-terror operation in the Gaza Strip as “killing for killing’s sake.”

A person or country that kills “for killing’s sake” represents the essence of evil. The last time Friedman used that phrase was to describe Muslim terrorists who slaughtered 170 civilians in India. That’s what Friedman thinks of Israel defending itself against mass murderers and gang-rapists in Gaza.

And it is essentially what Friedman has been saying about Israel, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly, for half a century now.

It was on Nov. 12, 1974, that Friedman began his career in attacking Israel. That was the day he and some fellow students at Brandeis University placed an open letter in The Brandeis Justice (the student newspaper) denouncing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the American Jewish community for opposing PLO head Yasser Arafat’s appearance at the United Nations.

Friedman and his friends declared that the mass Jewish rally outside the United Nations would “only reinforce Jewish anxiety and contribute to Israel’s further isolation.” They demanded that Rabin “negotiate with all factions of the Palestinians, including the PLO.” Remember that it was a time when the PLO was not even pretending to be moderate or ready to live in peace with Israel. Just months earlier, PLO terrorists had proudly massacred dozens of Israeli schoolchildren in the towns of Kiryat Shmona and Ma’alot.

Friedman was very proud of his extremist position—until a few years later, when he realized that it would be to his advantage to pretend that he had never criticized Israel before.

In 1982, Friedman was a junior reporter on the staff of The New York Times when he was assigned to cover the Israel-Lebanon war. He wrote a series of front-page articles denigrating Israel and then turned those articles into a best-selling book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. Its theme was that he was a strong supporter of Israel until he saw Israel’s actions in Lebanon, which “disillusioned him” and made him a critic of Israel. And that has been the leitmotif of his very lucrative career ever since.

The entire premise of the book was a lie, as his attacks on Israel at Brandeis demonstrated. But in the pre-Internet era, reporters weren’t going to take the trouble to comb through back issues of a student newspaper in Massachusetts. So Friedman got away with it.

As the Times’ bureau chief in Jerusalem from 1984 to 1988, and then as a Times op-ed columnist ever since, he has been one of Israel’s harshest critics in America. He has even tried to influence U.S. foreign policy. According to then-Secretary of State James Baker, Friedman would feed him anti-Israel policy advice when the two played tennis.

Baker credited Friedman for the notorious episode in which Baker publicly humiliated Israel by sarcastically announcing the White House phone number and declaring that the Israelis should call when they got serious about peace. 

Over the years, Friedman’s rhetoric has become more and more extreme.

In his New York Times column of Feb. 5, 2004, Friedman declared that Israel’s prime minister has “had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office … surrounded by Jewish and Christian pro-Israel lobbyists, by a vice president, Dick Cheney, who’s ready to do whatever Mr. Sharon dictates … ”

Friedman also claimed that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Jewish lobbyists, Vice President Cheney and unnamed “political handlers” were “all conspiring to make sure the president does nothing [regarding Israel].” Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch called Friedman’s statement, with its conspiratorial allegations about Jews, “an anti-Semitic slur.”

In his Dec. 13, 2011 column for the Times, Friedman wrote that the standing ovations Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received when he addressed Congress that year were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

On Nov. 19, 2013, Friedman wrote that there is “a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.”

If a white supremacist accused Jews of bribing Congress, controlling the president and “killing for killing’s sake,” he would be universally denounced as a bigot. It’s hard to see why Friedman doesn’t deserve to be described the same way.